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the closest thing to a matriarch or an ancient queen I'd ever experienced.
"Oh, shit, Marsha," I moaned when she was through. "What's your idea, anyway?"
She smiled. "You remember all those old Creatovi-
sion plots we had as kids?" She nodded to George.
"He doesn't that was before him. But you know where I'm going. I think it's
almost time we did the old alien plot for real."
I chuckled, liking what she had in mind the more I
thought of it. Of course George knew the plot it was
174
The Web of the Chozen ffi^dSe^r'8 awareness of other planets'
"She means," I said, barely restraining my mirth at
^y^ the idea was ^dy'conS up vSa^ane? monsters from outer space should £
Seventeen
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Back when I was very small, and Seiglein's Total Care
Center #31 was my whole world, the only escape from routine was Creatovision.
Oh, not the superfancy type, with the programmable plots, but there you were,
with a couple of friends, in somebody else's body (as far as you were
concerned), going through tremendous ad-
ventures. Sea stories could make you seasick, and if you hated the smell of
salt-spray or feared the depths they were not for you. Westerns could give you
very real psychosomatically induced saddle sores; love sto-
ries of the period we generally avoided.
But the kind of program that used to get to you, really get to a young child,
was the invasion plot. There were lots of invasion plots endless variations on
it, just as there were endless variations of the other plots, but this was a
special one.
It was designed to scare the hell out of you.
The monsters, usually from some kind of weird civilization, would arrive
secretly by spaceship and creep up on unsuspecting towns on newly Terraformed
worlds always new ones. I guess it's a lot harder to be convincing if you're
invading a superquad of three thousand prefabs. Usually the monsters would
take over your best friend, or all your neighbors, and they'd march around
looking weird and giving ultimatums to the government to give in or they'd
take over all the civilized worlds.
Some superscientific genius, usually with the Huang
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The Web of the Chozen
Corporation logo, would always arise, and figure out the indivisible zap ray
that would drive them out of the captive bodies.
Afterward we'd huddle together in the dorms and talk nervously about our own
experiences, seeing aliens in every dark comer, sleeping with the lights on,
look-
ing strangely at Comrade Juni who's been acting funny lately.
Now, here we were in the scout (no use risking the
Nijinsky or the rest of the colony), Marsha, George, a dozen or so others, and
me, sitting off a world cast adrift but still in the process of being
Terraformed, maybe fifty years from superquads and prefabs, con-
sidering how to go about taking over this place called
St. Cyril by the charts.
We were fifteen weird, nonhuman creatures, all but three spawned in a strange
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and unnatural environment, looking for a planet to take over, running through
the plans one last time, checking the wording on our ulti-
matum. The alien invaders at last were poised to strike, as all of us kids
knew they would someday, the
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the%20Chozen%20UC.txt evil mastermind directing it from his spaceship too ad-
vanced and fast to be caught
And here I was me, the evil mastermind, directing the scenario.
It pained me that I would not actually be a party to the raid; I was too
valuable to lose the only man who could direct the scoutship. But with
George's creative help, we would be able to hear, in some cases even see, what
was going on, much as Moses had done back on
Patmos.
Marsha was going, though, as the on-site leader.
She knew more about the layouts of colony worlds, what funny shapes would be
what, than anyone else.
I was nervous, not just for the mission, but for her.
This planet wasn't particularly far along as yet; there could be all sorts of
hidden dangers out there, perhaps even weapons.
Our communications system was a marvel. In some
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The Web of the Chozen ways, it was much like telepathy, although the basis was
bionic. George could receive selectively sound waves returning from any of the
party as the modulated information on a radio frequency carrier. After sub-
tracting the carrier wave the resulting sound patterns within the common Choz
frequency range could be interpreted as pictures or sound as if we were
sending and receiving the sonar or talking ourselves. It was an eerie
feeling I'd participated in many of the tests.
Like being in somebody else's body, yet totally without control of it.
Those of us on the ships could send, too although only in a common frequency
band. That, also, took some getting used to, since everyone in the landing
party would receive anything we said. It was agreed that, unless something
extraordinary came up, all com-
munications would be addressed to Marsha, whom we would monitor as the
standard again, unless there was a reason to switch.
The auras of the landing party showed them to be excited, expectant and
nervous as hell. Marsha was even more scared than the others, a good sign, I
felt.
A scared leader is a cautious one.
All we really needed to do to accomplish our pur-
poses was to land and take on, but this wasn't a ship, it was a planet. First,
the virus might not take to it
there might be some sort of radiation or something mu-
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the%20Chozen%20UC.txt tated in the vegetation that would stop it. Then, of
course, there was size though it was a small planet, it was huge by any other
standard. Moses began on
Patmos with four tiny areas; we didn't know how long it had taken him to
Choziform the savannas in their entirety, but George guessed it must have been
years.
Perhaps that affected the timing of the reproductive cycle. Who knew how Moses
thought?
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We couldn't wait. We wanted only a small patch at the start, and yet it had to
demonstrate the ongoing process.
We had to be seen.
The Web of the Chozen
I took one last survey of the place. A great deal of heat radiation from
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